American Healthcare: Not Trump’s Priority

All the wealth in this world is of no use when your health is failing. After all, you can’t bring your money and other worldly treasures to your grave. Invest in your health because it is the only thing that will last you a lifetime. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life suffering from a chronic disease or become bedridden in your last days here on earth because you abused your body during your younger years. You will only realize how much your health matters when it’s no longer in excellent shape.

However, it might not be a good time to be an American citizen these days. Under the leadership of Donald Trump, the quality of health care that each and every American receives remain to be the subject of endless debates. And to date, the current administration is still struggling on how to address these issues properly but to no avail. Just what does this uncertainty mean to the rest of the American population?

If Obama proved anything, and perhaps this point he proved a little too well, nothing in government should be rushed. Not only is the pace of democracy the difference between getting things done and not, it’s the difference between making good and bad decisions. (Look at the War on Terror, for example). Obama took months working on the Affordable Care Act, constructing over 2,000 pages of parameters with Congress. Trump on the other hand is trickling down pressure on Congress to essentially fling more shit at the wall, for the sake of fulfilled campaign promises. Thankfully the Senate will have to revise and send the bill back to the House for a second vote, but with their Republican majority, the outlook is still grim.

The health of the American people, our lives are literally boiling down to the ego of one (potentially not even that) wealthy white man. And that is something people need to sit down and think about. Think about anyone you love who has ever faced a serious illness. Even those with something as common as asthma could end up with astronomically unaffordable premiums. Your uncle with diabetes won’t have insulin. If your mother’s cancer came back, she wouldn’t have coverage to fight it. These are real scenarios that will kill people if we let Congress push through an irresponsible vanity bill in place of actual healthcare legislation. Call your representatives and let them know that no one deserves to die over a dollar.

It just goes to show how prior political knowledge and experience matters when it comes to nation building. Trump may have won the presidential election and beaten a veteran like Hillary Clinton but it won’t be easy running a country as big and as diverse as America especially for someone like Trump who is full of biases and opinions.

President Donald Trump returned home from his big foreign trip this weekend and immediately resumed tweeting strange opinions about Congress. If there is one thing that congressional Republicans just love, it is when Trump—who doesn’t know a single thing about the legislature, federal policy, or anything pertaining to the federal government that he runs—tweets about congressional strategy and policy. In none of his tweets can we ever figure out an understanding of the topic at hand or a duly considered policy purpose, including these newest ones. We may, however, be able to decipher what he heard in his most recent briefing from his legislative liaisons or envoys from the Republican congressional leadership.

After a brisk Saturday morning tweet storm about the “Fake News” and its lies, Trump offered the following opinion about health care reform, several months into the effort and after House Republicans had put their careers on the line grinding out narrow passage of a bill that no one liked:

Many times Trump took to Twitter to issue statements that should’ve been hushed from the public but obviously, he is a different mold from the rest of us mere mortals. The big downside to his leadership is that he is letting his personal biases cloud his judgment. His blatant hatred for minority groups led him to initiate the crackdown on illegal immigrants that is taking up a lot of the nation’s resources. Other things he didn’t consider important also lost a lot of support in term of funding such as the arts, education, and healthcare.

He has been so adamant in trying to repeal Obamacare but didn’t make much progress in Congress due to the lack of support even from Republicans he’s been openly chastising lately. This lack of progress is apparently ticking him off a lot but what’s to be blamed here is actually his ignorance on how legislation works. It is not a piece of cake to reform the existing health care policies of the land. He needs to understand that before anything else. But most of all, the reforms he should be pushing for should be for the best interests of his constituents because his policies aren’t earning him thumbs up even from conservatives who helped put him into office in the first place.